The Image Of The Child, "lonely"

The novel Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio creates a colorful, amazing and ever-changing world of fairy tales with the widest fancy and complicated, touching plots. In this imaginary world, a great number of characters are produced including the untraceable fox spirit and handsome scholars. But only those children characters who are witted, brave, kind-hearted, adorable, innocent or with exceptional function can touch children's hearts deeply. Though children images are not regarded as the key characters in this novel, these children images created by Pu Songling are vivid, distinctive and easy to strike a chord with the little readers- children. This thesis makes an effort to make a systematic summary and analysis of children images in the novel and try to probe the shaping art and the formation source of these classical children images. It aims to show Pu Songling's thoughts and value towards society and life and his true inner feelings.This thesis is composed of three chapters excluding introduction and conclusion parts.Chapter One firstly gives the definition of the concept"children"—the study subject of the thesis, and then discusses the characteristics of the novel-fairy tales. Finally, the author gives the classification of children images and makes an illustration of the respective features of these four types of children images of filiality, evil, wit, bravery and with exceptional function.Chapter Two makes an analysis of children images from four aspects: individualized language in accordance with children's features, waving inner feelings, vivid portrait highlighting children's characters and typical behavior. As for the illustration of the shaping art, it will be investigated from many perspectives such as narrative language and human language, the diversified, multi-level expression portrait of mental characteristics under the influence of social environment and change of plots, multi-angle portrait description to enrich people's images, behavior change of representative images, typical children games to show children images and so on.Chapter Three mainly discusses the roots of why these children images are produced from four aspects: the influence of contemporary literature style and traditional culture, the stimulation of social reality, the experience of being private school master, childlike innocence. In regard to the influence of traditional culture, the analysis is made from three aspects: the influence of filial culture, karma, and the virtue of bravery.This thesis is aimed at having a better understanding of Pu Songling's works Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and its cultural connotation from a brand-new perspective through the thorough analysis of children images produced in the works.